Go, Ivy, Go! by Lorena McCourtney Read Free Book Online

herd grasshoppers. Somehow I doubted she’d been a police officer for long. She sent me to stand by my motorhome, Mac to wait by his. Eric clung to the bench he was sitting on. Tasha rebelled and clamped an I’m-not-moving hand on his shoulder.
    “We won’t talk to each other about the dead woman,” she said.
    Policewoman frowned, but she accepted that compromise.
    More police people arrived. Radios crackled. A fire truck and an ambulance showed up. It wasn’t chaos, but it wasn’t exactly the finest example of authority in action when the fire truck and a police car backed into each other.
    We were questioned separately. Mac’s session with a sharp looking Hispanic officer was brief, Eric and Tasha’s with a different officer a little longer. Lucky me, I got Ms. Junior High, She looked at her hand a couple of times, introduced herself as Officer DeLora and asked my name.
    “Ivy Malone.”
    “But the dead woman is Ivy Malone,” she objected.
    “She can’t be Ivy Malone,” I objected. “ I ’m Ivy Malone. What makes you think she is?”
    “Identification.”
    “What kind of identification?”
    “A library card. It was in a purse in the bedroom. Along with mail addressed to Ivy Malone.” She frowned as if realizing that was information she probably shouldn’t be sharing with me.
    “Anyone can fake a name to get a library card,” I pointed out. Although it seemed a lot of bother for such a minor thing.
    “Why would she fake it?” Officer DeLora scoffed. “Maybe you’re faking your identity.”
    “Why would I fake it? Look, just let me go in the motorhome and I can prove who I am. I have a driver’s license.”
    She wasn’t about to let me go in the motorhome alone, although I didn’t know what she thought I could do in there. Escape by doing a high-tech morph of motorhome into flying machine? Or maybe she thought I had an AK-47 stashed in my closet. She followed me inside. Koop met us at the door. He didn’t hiss at her, but he backed away when she started to pet him.
    “Cats usually like me.” She sounded unexpectedly dismayed by Koop’s rejection.
    “Are you a smoker? Koop has a real hangup about smokers.”
    “No! I quit.”
    I lifted my eyebrows at her hasty claim. Koop is better than police profiling when targeting a smoker.
    “My mother thinks I’ve quit.” She shot a guilty glance back over her shoulder as if afraid Mother might be standing there listening. “And I’m really trying.”
    Koop, stickler that he is, doesn’t give points for trying. He flicked his stubby tail and headed for the bedroom. I handed her my driver’s license and the registration on the motorhome. Both were from Colorado, where I’d spent some time and where my good friend Abilene now lives with her veterinarian husband. It was her address I’d used for the license and registration. Another of my tactics for hiding from the Braxtons, who seemed to have tentacles everywhere.
    “That’s an older address,” I explained. “I’ll be living here in my own home now.”
    “You’re saying you own this place?”
    “For more years than you are old.”
    The officer took down all the information from both license and registration, though she didn’t seem convinced of my identity even yet. The other woman was in the house, also with identification, and there’s that old saying about possession being nine-tenths of the law. Did that nine-tenths apply even if you were dead?
    Someone from the Medical Examiner’s office arrived while Officer DeLora was grilling me. Crime scene people showed up along with a couple of guys in plain clothes that I thought were probably police force detectives. People collected on the sidewalk to watch. Tasha had left after being questioned but she was back now, one hand protectively resting on her husband’s shoulder again.
    Officer DeLora finally finished with me, although she warned there might be more questions later. I couldn’t think what else they might ask, unless they